Tag Archives: Republican Senate

24/7

Nine Republican senators have signed a letter to Mitch McConnell calling on him to “turn the Senate on full time, 24/7, to advance the president’s agenda,” Axios reports. The senators write that “perversion of Senate rules” by Democrats, “designed to imperil” President Trump’s agenda, necessitates the step.

— Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), quoted by the New York Times, on drafting the Senate healthcare bill.

“Idiot, whoever says that is a stupid idiot, who has not been here and seen what I’ve been through and how we were able to avoid that on several occasions. And they are stupid and they’ve deceived their voters because they are so stupid.”

— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), expressing his is anger that the “nuclear option” will not be avoided in the fight over Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, the Washington Post reports.

For seven years, through artificial debt ceiling crises, deliberate government shutdowns, and intentional confirmation blockades, Senate Republicans have acted as though the election and reelection of Obama relieved them of any responsibility to do their jobs. Senate Republicans embraced the idea that government shouldn’t work at all unless it works only for themselves and their friends. The campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the next logical outgrowth of the same attitude — if you can’t get what you want, just ignore the obligations of governing, then divert attention and responsibility by wallowing in a toxic stew of attacks on Muslims, women, Latinos, and each other.

— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tore into her Republican colleagues in a Boston Globe op-ed, arguing that since President Obama was elected, they have “refused to try to make government better — opting instead to try to shut down government altogether rather than to accept a functioning government led by someone they didn’t like.”

Today, the Senate’s engaged in its budget vote-a-rama,
A most clamorous scene of high crimes and low drama.
They vote on amendments
Not understanding their contents,
But it still ain’t a budget ’til it’s approved by Obama.

The 47 senators who mounted the intervention
Thought they were preventing nuclear annihilation.
But it would have been better
To have not sent the letter,
Which Iran saw as proof of the U.S.’s disintegration.

Leave it to Al Jazeera America to give a little lesson in international relations to the 47 asshats who signed the now infamous letter to Iran threatening to obviate any agreement on that country’s nuclear designs. It’s worth a read, since I haven’t seen a similar explainer in the capitol press corp’s output.

Here’s a sample:

Beyond the amusing inaccuracies about U.S. parliamentary order, it seems there are some features of the nuclear negotiations that the signatory senators don’t fully understand — not only on the terms of the deal, but also on who would be party to an agreement.

There are no negotiations on Iran’s “nuclear-weapons program” because the world’s intelligence agencies (including those of the U.S. and Israel) do not believe Iran is currently building nuclear weapons, nor has it made a strategic decision to use its civilian nuclear infrastructure to produce a bomb. An active Iranian nuclear-weapons program would render moot the current negotiations, because Iran would be in fundamental violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

That is the decision the majority leader is going to have to make. I believe we should use every constitutional tool available to stop the president’s unconstitutional executive action. That’s what Republicans, Republican candidates all over the country said over and over again last year.

The legislative dynamics in Washington are very simple. Gridlock exists because Obama and House Republicans cannot agree on legislation. If Obama and the House could agree on legislation, their deal would be approved by a Democratic-controlled Senate or by a Republican-controlled Senate. There are no plausible circumstances in which the Senate would block a deal struck between the House and Obama, because, whichever party controls the Senate, its ideological center will sit comfortably inside in the enormous space between Obama and the House Republicans. Ergo, the party that controls the Senate has no impact on legislative outcomes.

— Rep. Steve King (R-IA), quoted by the Daily Beast, on the advantage of the GOP taking control of the U.S. Senate.

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Enumerati

40%

“President Trump came to Washington promising to ‘drain the swamp.’ But after less than 13 months, more than 40 percent of the people he originally picked for Cabinet-level jobs have faced ethical or other controversies. And the list has grown quickly in recent weeks,” the Washington Post reports.

Enumerati

$26 million

“President Trump’s inaugural committee paid nearly $26 million to an event planning firm started by an adviser to First Lady Melania Trump, while donating $5 million — less than expected — to charity,” the New York Times reports.

Enumerati

63%

A new Gallup survey finds 63% of Americans in hindsight say they approve of the way Barack Obama handled his job. “Gallup’s first measure of Obama’s retrospective job approval rating places him behind only John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan among the 10 most recent presidents. Richard Nixon is rated worst today for how he handled his job, with 28% approving.”

Enumerati

$30 million

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told Congress that President Trump’s planned military parade would cost between $10 million and $30 million, the Washington Post reports.

Enumerati

15%

Gallup: “Congressional approval is now 15%, down slightly from an uptick to 20% last month after Congress passed tax reform in December. Positivity quickly faded this month as the government shut down twice in three weeks because of impasses over the federal budget.”

Poetic Justice

Trump’s budget, by human compassion, is unencumbered.
As usual, for the poor and working class, it’s a bummer.
And that ballooning deficit?
Our grandkids will pay for it,
Though Mick Mulvaney says he could have balanced it using “funny numbers.”

“You would be worried about Pence, We would be begging for days of Trump back if Pence became president. He’s extreme. I’m Christian, I love Jesus, but he thinks Jesus tells him to say things.”

Verbatim

“So I just made a statement, I’m a Christian that believes we ought to propagate our Christian faith. So I see an article and I retweet, ‘no more mosques in America,’ you know, and like, and share. So I retweeted it. So yeah. So what? I believe in Christian — I believe in liberties, freedom, free speech, and Christian values is kind of my base. And so yeah, I posted it, so no big deal. I’m not that stressed out over it.”

— North Dakota U.S. Senate candidate Gary Emineth (R), defending in a radio interview his sharing an image on Twitter that said no more mosques should be built in the United States.

Verbatim

“If he wants due process for the over dozen sexual assault allegations against him, let’s have Congressional hearings tomorrow. I would support that and my colleagues should too.”

— Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), slamming President Trump for his tweet questioning a lack of “due process” in abuse claims, saying that Congress could hold hearings about sexual misconduct allegations against him if he wanted due process, The Hill reports.